In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  JOHN MUIR WAS haunted by what he experienced on St. Lawrence Island. “The scene was indescribably ghastly,” he wrote, noting its stark juxtapositions. “Gulls, plovers, and ducks were swimming and flying about in happy life, the pure salt sea was dashing white against the shore, the blooming tundra swept back to the snow-clad volcanoes,” yet the village lay “in the foulest and most glaring death.”

  As far as Muir could tell, the American presence in the Arctic had thus far been anything but beneficial. What had happened on St. Lawrence Island was but an extreme distillation of larger forces at work across America’s northernmost frontier. Muir now could see that this icy wilderness was as vulnerable as it was vast—marked by fragile rhythms of migration, interdependencies of population, and patterns of habit many thousands of years in the making. And yet it seemed to be unraveling before his eyes.

  Alaska had been an American possession for slightly more than a decade. The czar’s influence, weak in the first place, had faded. While it could not be said that contact with Russian trappers and traders had improved the lives of Alaskan natives—far from it—the Russian fur concerns had rarely reached the level of entrepreneurial organization and ruthless efficiency pursued by American whalers, trading agents, and fur companies. The systematic introduction of just a few things—repeating rifles, booze, money, industrial methods of dismantling animal flesh—had caused the native cultures of Alaska to collapse at record speed.

  “Even where alcohol is left out of the count,” Muir wrote, “the few articles of food, clothing, guns, etc., furnished by the traders, exert a degrading influence, making them less self-reliant, and less skillful as hunters.” Muir worried that “unless some aid be extended by our government which claims these people, in a few years…every soul of them will have vanished from the face of the earth.”

  ON JUNE 29, the Corwin anchored alongside a rim of ice a few miles from the tiny village of Tapkan. A strong wind was blowing from the north, and the ship bobbed in heavy swells. Scanning the shoreline with his field glasses, Captain Hooper was excited and relieved to see an American flag snapping in the breeze, over a white tent: Lieutenant Herring and his overland expedition had returned. Everyone on board roused into action. The anticipation was electric. “Speculation ran high throughout the ship,” Hooper said, “as to what success they had met with. Had they found the Jeannette?”

  Hooper began to make arrangements for sending a party onshore, until he noticed that Herring’s men had quickly broken camp and were now struggling over the ice toward the Corwin. It took the better part of the day, but finally Herring reached the ship and came aboard. By then, the seas had grown so heavy that Captain Hooper realized he could no longer remain anchored where he was. Arrangements were hastily made for paying the Tapkan dog drivers—a rifle, ammunition, a bolt of calico fabric, and a few other articles; then Hooper turned the Corwin toward the open sea.

  When the swells finally settled down, Hooper gathered Herring and the other American expeditioners in his cabin and learned the story of what had taken place over the past month.

  HERRING AND HIS party of three Americans and three native dog drivers had left their landing site at Kolyuchin Island on June 2 and headed over the ice. They had an extremely hard time at first—their sled broke, the dogs quarreled, the way was hopelessly slushy—but they were fortunate enough to encounter some native seal hunters, who guided them to their settlement, some twenty-five miles to the west.

  The village of Kolyuchin consisted of twenty-six dwellings and about three hundred people. The town elder received the Americans warmly and invited them into his hut, where they drank cup after cup of Russian tea. Herring inquired about the story of an American shipwreck somewhere to the west, but the elder had never heard of it. He told Herring that most of the villagers here had never seen a white man before, which explained their curiosity about the American visitors. The natives offered the travelers a feast of reindeer and fresh cod, and they stayed up until four in the morning drinking coffee and sharing tales.

  After a day of rest, Herring and his party got under way again, slogging west along the Arctic coast for a week, building nightly bonfires of driftwood to dry out their drenched furs. Although they passed several villages, most of the time they trudged through expanses of absolute desolation. Along the way, they searched in vain for cairns or any other signs of the Jeannette. They reached a tiny settlement of five huts called Onman, where several villagers told Herring they’d heard the story of the broken vessel, adding that if he proceeded some twenty miles to the west, he would come to the village of Wankerem, where the story was better known.

  So Lieutenant Herring hastened for Wankerem and was kindly invited into one of the village huts. He distributed presents of tobacco and coffee and explained the purpose of his visit. The villagers smiled and nodded and then promptly summoned three men, who were able to tell the story of the shipwreck firsthand. Pieced together by Chukchi Joe, the translator, this is the tale they told:

  Last fall, when the new ice was making, we were out sealing near the island we call Concarpio, when we saw a wrecked vessel drifting down toward the island. We went to the wreck, which was half full of water. The three masts had been cut off near the decks, to make firewood.

  In the cabin we found four bodies—three of them were lying in their beds, and one floating in the water. They had been dead for some time. Their skin was dried up, black, and drawn tightly over the bones. The wind was shifting, and we were afraid to stay long. We gathered a few things and left the ship. The next night the wind changed to the southward, and the wreck drifted off shore. We never saw it again.

  Lieutenant Herring inquired about the articles they had taken from the ship. Did you find any books or papers? he asked.

  No, they said, such things are of no use to us.

  Herring explained that his primary interest was in identifying the ship. Was there anything unusual about it, anything that might seem different from other ships?

  The seal hunters thought about it for a while and then said: We saw that someone had placed a pair of deer antlers, high up on the ship. Herring was intrigued by this strange detail—it did not sound like the kind of decoration that a commander like De Long would allow on a U.S. Navy ship. By sketching out a diagram with the three hunters, Herring was able to determine that the antlers had been attached to the ship’s jibboom.

  Herring wanted to know more about the other things the men had taken from the ship. The three hunters disappeared and quickly returned with a small trove of loot. Among the items were two wood saws, an ax, a harpoon, a bottle of laudanum, a razor, a pair of spectacles, a candlestick, and a metal stove pan that had been stamped by its manufacturer in Philadelphia. None of the articles bore any private names, but there was a table knife with the letter V engraved on its handle.

  Herring thanked the hunters and paid them a nice price for those items he thought most likely to help identify the ship. He asked the villagers if they had ever heard of a place called Wrangel, a mysterious land somewhere out over the ice to the north. As he later told John Muir, “They all shook their heads and said that they knew nothing of land in that direction. But one old man told them that long ago he heard something about a party of men who had come from some far unknown land to the north, over the ice.”

  After gaining assurances that no news had been heard of any other American vessels for hundreds of miles, Herring decided to turn back toward Tapkan before the summer’s advance made the shore ice more treacherous. He and his party harnessed their dogs and headed east, reaching Tapkan in mid-June.

  Waiting for the Corwin to return, the Americans were invited to a festival celebrating the village’s first successful walrus hunt. The severed head of a walrus was brought into the chief’s hut and ceremonially positioned on the ground in the center. A crowd of villagers gathered around the bewhiskered trophy, and then the chief delivered an elaborate oration and ordered his youngest son to place offerings of blessed reindeer and
seal meat inside the mouth of the walrus. Then, as the ceremony continued outside, pieces of meat were tossed in the cardinal directions. Much drumming, chanting, and dancing followed; the Americans, exhausted by their long excursion, were happily intrigued by it all.

  While in Tapkan, Lieutenant Herring met a group of walrus hunters who claimed they not only had seen but had briefly boarded the Jeannette on her way north. It was in the late summer of 1879; De Long had made a stop off Cape Serdtse-Kamen when he was looking for news about Nordenskiöld. The walrus hunters told Herring that the ship was “a steamer with three masts” and that there were two Alaskan Inuit men on board, whom they recognized by the labrets—decorative studs—in their lips. They also told Herring that there were a “large number of dogs and sleds seen on her decks.”

  These details were all correct and impressed Lieutenant Herring. He thought their description “goes to show that the natives … take notice of everything that passes near the coast. Had a vessel or party of white men visited since that time the natives would have known it, and accounts would have reached us.”

  CAPTAIN HOOPER LISTENED to Lieutenant Herring’s story carefully. Two details leapt out at him. The first was the letter V engraved on the table knife, which he personally inspected. The second was the hunters’ observation that a set of deer antlers was attached to the ship’s jibboom. The American whaling ship Vigilant had had a pair of antlers attached to its jibboom. It was a kind of trademark, well known among the captains of the whaling fleet.

  In Hooper’s mind, that settled it. The shipwreck in question was certainly not the Jeannette. It was the Vigilant, a 215-ton wooden whaling bark out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, captained by Charles Smithers. Other Arctic whalers had last spotted the Vigilant in October 1879 to the southwest of Herald Island, where she’d become locked in the ice. The Vigilant was supposed to be carrying $16,000 worth of oil and baleen. Smithers had sailed her from Hawaii with a crew of thirty; Hooper’s guess was that all hands were lost.

  But there was still hope for the Jeannette. Captain Hooper remained convinced that De Long’s expedition had survived and that the men were stranded on, or near, the mysterious Wrangel Land.

  Captain Hooper felt that the fast-thinning pack and unusually mild weather offered him the best opportunity he would ever have of reaching Wrangel. In the first week of July, the Corwin steamed away from the coast of Siberia, headed east toward St. Michael, Alaska.

  June 12, 1881

  My own dearest husband—

  I have such a strong feeling that I will see or hear from you this summer I can hardly wait.

  May God bless and preserve you wherever you are and bring you back safely and all those with you. Remember me to my friends of the Jeannette—I dare not say on the Jeannette for she may be at the bottom of the ocean and you may be struggling for your lives in boats or on the ice.

  Never mind, darling, I will bear up under any circumstances, and will meet you with open arms however and whenever you return…

  Emma

  28 · NIL DESPERANDUM

  In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

  De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

  Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

  The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

  Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

  As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

  There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

  The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

  At the end of each day, said Melville, the men were “utterly fagged out.” Some fainted from exhaustion. Others shivered from hypothermia, having plunged into the frigid water. De Long, who often chose to assume the harness with his men, said that “a more tired and hungry set of mortals could not be found … Every bone ache[s].” Danenhower, echoing the captain, noted that each day, every man “voted this the hardest day’s work he had ever done in his life.”

  Yet it was extraordinary how content most of them were during the first weeks of the march, living like mules, suffering so. Nearly everyone commented on it. They slept soundly, developed ferocious appetites, and functioned
each day with a clarity of purpose they had never known in their lives.

  “Just now we are living royally … and are in glorious health,” a surprised De Long wrote at the outset. “Everybody is bright and cheerful, and our camp has a lively look…singing is going on all around.” Melville observed that the men were always “whooping” and often fell into “roars of laughter and good-natured banter … No ship’s company ever endured such severe toil with such little complaint.” As they tramped through the ice, they sang old Irish ballads and wayfaring songs, tunes like “The Rocky Road to Dublin”:

  I was a-hobblin’ with a loud array,

  They joined me in the fray.

  We quickly cleared the way

  On the rocky road to Dublin.

  As harsh as it was, the icescape could also be beautiful. Seawater steadily lapped at the undersides of the floes, creating a soughing sound that was comforting in its constancy, like the flutter of a million insect wings. In places, the men encountered strange elegant monuments, made of old compressed ice, that shone an otherworldly aquamarine blue. On certain patches of the pack, a species of algae left a patina of brilliant reddish orange—watermelon snow, it was called.

  De Long noted how the sun flickered through the fog; it “glimmers and blinks like a drunkard’s eye.” The heavy, moist air, he observed, was alive with “groans and shrieks from all directions” as large “snouts of snow” rose, inch by inch, from colliding ice pieces. Every now and then a massive floe, wallowing, glurping, would suddenly upend, trapping small fish in its pockets and divots. The fish would splutter and zag, frantically searching for a way out of their new prisons.

  DE LONG AND his men had left the site of the Jeannette’s sinking on the evening of June 18. Before taking off, De Long jotted a note: “We break camp and start to the southward over the ice, hoping with God’s blessing to reach the New Siberian Islands, and from there make our way by boats to the coast of Siberia.” The captain rolled the note in a piece of black rubber and stashed it in a small water cask. He left it on the ice, hoping that it “may get somewhere.”